RECAST - ElevenLabs Chief of Staff Victoria Weller | The business power of AI voice (Podcast 602)

What the fuck?

This is like, it's really cool shit. Like, this isn't—

There are 2 ways on ElevenLabs to clone a voice. The first is instant voice cloning, where you upload 30 seconds of audio and then you get a voice clone and you can read any text out loud in the specific voice. And then there's professional voice cloning, which is a higher quality voice clone for which you need 30 minutes of input data.

I went into studio to record my 6th It's called The Second in Command, and I spent two and a half days in studio in Dubai recording my audiobook, and I literally felt like poking my effing eyes out with my pen. Like I was just like someone kill me. This was eight hours a day standing, trying to actually be excited. It's hard for me to be excited reading it, and then all of a sudden I find out that I could literally now that I've read that entire book, I can upload it. I can take a few of my speaking events and upload that content that will train your system AI. And your system could literally punch out the audio recording for me without me having to spend what would now be 14 more days in studio. It's fucking amazing. All right. You're going to love this episode that we have today. You're going to want to watch this one on our Second Command Podcast YouTube channel as well. We've got Victoria Weller, who is the chief of staff from ElevenLabs. Uh, she's going to talk about her background in astrophysics around the safety of artificial intelligence, about why ElevenLabs is one of the fastest growing companies in the AI space in 2023. Having raised $20 million at a $100 million valuation because they'd already had millions of customers. Yeah, millions. Her background in space medicine, and also going to talk about the leverage and what their company, ElevenLabs, does in the AI space of text-to-voice technology. We even talk a little bit about extraterrestrials. You're going to love this episode. We'll see you on the inside. Before we continue, today's episode is supported by our trusted gold partner, Redirect Health. If you've ever felt like you're overspending on healthcare and your employees can't even afford to use it, then listen up. Redirect Health offers healthcare benefits that finally make health insurance optional. It's a 24-hour online primary care and Rx membership that protects your business by guiding employees before problems happen. That means you're not overpaying for coverage that you don't need. It's like your mom is your doctor. You'll always know the healthcare you need Where to get it, and when it makes sense to use insurance so that you can pay the least. Redirect Health, protection for business and guidance for people. Go check out redirectcoo.com. That's redirectcoo.com. And if you're talking to them, let them know that Cameron at the COO Alliance recommended you go there as well. So Victoria, welcome to the Second Command Podcast.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, very much looking forward to doing this episode with you. Really looking forward to learning from you. I love just before we went live, you explaining that You've lived in London, you've lived in Berlin, you've lived in Edinburgh, you lived in New York. What an amazing opportunity as a human to be able to live in some of the best cities in the world. Tell us how that all happened.

I've been very lucky to be able to move around that much, and I think there is something that I was able to take from each of the places I lived in. But to go chronologically, it happened that I went to an international school in Munich where I grew up. So it was always tailored, my education was tailored towards going abroad to study. And I never even considered staying in Munich or even staying in Germany for my education, but only looked across at the US or in the UK and then got accepted into Edinburgh. I had applied for architecture and then last minute pivoted to astrophysics. And Edinburgh was open enough to, as they mentioned, as they called it, open an experiment to see whether I would be successful at studying astrophysics, even though I hadn't done physics higher level in my IB. It was successful in the end. Loved my 4 years there and then had an opportunity for a role at the Center for Space Medicine in Berlin. It's part of the Charité, which is one of the biggest hospitals slash medicine universities in Germany. And I was a research assistant there for a year, both Teaching the medicine students in some of their modules, but also doing a literature review of every piece of research that had been done on how the body changes and more specifically how the cardiovascular system changes in microgravity. So what is different about the blood system of an astronaut versus the blood system of everyone else, like every one of us down? And what are the complications that this can lead to both when going to space, but also when coming back And that was really exciting. We ended up publishing a Springer Brief, small book about this at the end of the year. I loved my time there. I would've really liked to continue thinking about astronauts and maybe even, even becoming one. But for a career at the Center for Space Medicine, as the name says, it would've been crucial to study medicine or at least physiology. I also realized that I really miss physics and the rationality behind that and the formulae and the Greek alphabet. I started looking into doing a master's, master's degree in physics again, started applying for that. And while I was going through the applications, did an internship at a microsatellite startup in Berlin, which was also really exciting. Spent 3 months simulating their sun baffles. So thinking about when you want to take a picture of stars from a satellite in space, you want it to be as dark as possible. You want to get only the light from the star. And to get as much light as possible from the star and little interference from everything else around, all the other stars and galaxies, they put baffles on top of the cameras on the satellites. You can have different shapes and steps and different colorings and coatings. And we were running simulations often like overnight of all the different geometrical positions we could have of the sunlight baffles to find the best one to construct and then put on, on these microsatellites to send After I'd gone, I'd been done with— it was called Berlin Space Technologies. I got accepted to Columbia University and went to New York for a master's in applied physics. So less extraterrestrial, more down-on-earth physics, and did my master's in New York, which was an incredible experience, both from the education at Columbia, but also from living in New York in my early 20s. That was an incredible opportunity. And I loved every day of it and I loved it so much that it went so fast. I felt like I blinked twice and I had finished my master's. And so I decided to take the opportunity that you get after getting a degree in the US. If you're a foreigner, German at least, you have an OPT, so you're allowed to stay for 3 years with a STEM subject to work.

Yeah.

And I got a job at a startup, which was in hindsight a perfect segue for me into the data tech world. And the startup is called Crypt and they do quantum secure data encryption. And they had both hardware components and software components. This was a perfect combination because I could speak to the hardware components on which lasers were split, phase shifted, and interfered to create quantum random numbers that were then used for the encryption of data, but was also working on the software pieces in a sort of project management role and moved closer to tech and understood the importance of data and the use of data. And then found out about Palantir and applied there as a reliability engineer and joined Palantir in 2019, which is actually my most recent position before ElevenLabs. I was at Palantir in New York for the first couple of months until the pandemic hit, relocated with them to London. Stayed for another couple of years and now in May switched to a startup called ElevenLabs, which does text-to-speech AI. And I'm working there as chief of staff and own all the internal operations as well as compliance and hiring and HR and a big hodgepodge of things that are super fast moving and really exciting and exactly what I want to do. At the time being, I think you can tell that there's like so many different things that I did that now in one role, I get to do so many different things, which I really enjoy.

I'm kind of dumbfounded. I mean, anyone who's watching this on our YouTube channel, we have a Second Command Podcast YouTube channel, will see why I'm dumbfounded. You don't look old enough to have done all this stuff. Even, and, but even when you said, you know, you got your master's in your early 20s, or you started your master's in your early 20s, you've really done a lot at quite a young age. Clearly, I mean, anyone to clearly to work in astrophysics is clearly smart. And I'm glad you gave us a bit of a glimpse as to what astrophysics is. I've heard of it. Physics was really one of the only courses in high school that I loved, and I was never like fantastic at, but it made sense to me. I think it appealed to the logic side of my world. I'm curious how you go from all of this real science, real kind of esoteric, real kind of, you know, mathematical, and then into the business world. Like, how do you make that leap? It doesn't seem like a very logical leap, but I know that you've done it and many engineers are running you know, tech companies. So how do you learn business and how have you made that leap?

It was in the end, mostly it came down to logic for that leap. The more time I spent with astrophysics or with physics and research, I realized the timeframes over which huge changes and impact happens. Before going to Edinburgh during my studies, I also did an internship at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. And for my entire summer, I was analyzing the gamma-ray burst in the spectral catalog of these explosions that had been seen over the last 2 years. And I spent 6 weeks just selecting the background and the foreground. And this was a tiny part of a huge spectral catalog, which in turn was a tiny part of a bigger piece of research, which might take someone a lifetime to find something that is truly life-changing or in, in their world life-changing, then ends up being not really life-changing to the rest of the civilization. So I realized that you are very much in a niche that not many others care about, but you also operate on terrestrial or extraterrestrial timeframes where it's taken the light millions of years to reach you, and it might take you many years as well to, uh, aha moment from it. And so that I realized that wasn't the speed that I want to operate at, as well as the locations usually where these things happen, especially astrophysics research happens. We spoke briefly about the light interference of satellite observatories, but for observatories on Earth, that's an even bigger consideration. You can't be close to a city because the city lights and the pollution and the scattering of light makes all of your extraterrestrial observations worse. So you end up being in the Atacama Desert or anywhere by design that is dark and is far away from civilization, but is also like in need of a lot of space and therefore cheap. And I like Berlin and New York and London.

Yeah.

And so there was a contradiction there as well. And then there's a financial aspect and then there's For me, it's really important to get along with colleagues and love who I work with. At some point, I also realized that those people are more in the business world rather than in the research world.

So I got to ask you one final question around physics, and then we'll kind of dive into Eleven in the business world. So are there extraterrestrials and are we living in a simulation?

Both amazing questions. I don't know how you expect me to answer them really quickly before talking about ElevenLabs. I don't know. It would be really fun if either of these were true. For the first one, I would say like, what gives us the right to think that we're the only civilization out there? The universe is so vast, surely. But I don't have better insight there to other people. But I think for that one, I, if you, if I had to choose, I would like to believe that yes. And for the latter, I think not. I think this is, this is real.

I think, I think for the latter, it's a fun Burning Man conversation, but it's not It's not necessarily one that really makes sense, but it just doesn't make any sense how we can be the only species in the entire solar universe. It just makes no sense. And that will probably be the one regret that I would have before I die, that we don't find something. That's kind of the one unanswered thing that would be kind of cool, other than like, why are we here? Which we'll never figure that one out.

That's another really frustrating thing about physics is you, you spend so much time trying to find the answer to these unsolved problems and you might die before the answer is found. And it's just so frustrating to think that you might never know, like we will never know. We won't be there for the answer of these things. And that's maybe another thing that deterred me from physics.

It makes sense that it would deter you because I think all of a sudden your intelligence and logic would kick in and say like, what's the point of doing all this work if it just isn't going to be used or pay off or if no one's really going to care? Like I see that one solar burst and great, 3 people care. Like really? I just spent a year doing something. No one, I get it. So it makes sense.

I think it really depends what motivates you. Some people are excited by seeing those solar bursts and that's all they care about. They would do it even if no one read the papers or they wouldn't even get to write the papers. They just want to think about solar bursts all day. But I'm personally someone that's also motivated by the recognition and therefore want to do something where I see the impact either directly or indirectly on the way that I wanted to ask you about that.

You mentioned when you were working in space medicine, which also is super intriguing, like, holy shit. By the way, just like a quick question, how different is the physiology and the needs of the human body in space versus on Earth? Like, is it drastically different or is it kind of similar?

I mean, it's still a human body and you still have to eat and digest. The impact of gravity on the human body though is so much more profound than You will think. We're so used to like standing up from a chair and like when we're in a headstand, it just feels different. And in space that is taken away. And there are many things that happen as a consequence that you wouldn't think of right away. The impact that I spent most time thinking about was on the cardiovascular system, where probably the hardest impact apart from muscle dystrophy. So astronauts have to work out for several hours per day. to keep up their muscle, but also their bone mass as a result so that they're not completely weak and unstable when returning to Earth. But other than that, the cardiovascular system takes a huge hit as a result of, of gravity not pulling down all liquids to your lower extremities, but rather everything kind of moves up a little bit like you're in a handstand, but maybe somewhere in between.

Right.

The human body has baroreceptors, so ways of measuring the pressure in the upper part, like, of your body around your chest area.

Sure.

And if all the liquid is pushed up, the baroreceptors are like, oh, pressure is higher. It must mean that there's too much liquid. And then astronauts that just arrive in space, the body is like, okay, signal too much liquid. Let's start reducing our blood volume. Everything's back to normal. They have a great time while they're up there and everything's like transferred the blood is transferred up. Then when they go back to Earth and everything's pulled to their feet, they often like, they can't walk or they would faint when they walk.

Wow.

And there are many things that you can do to, to prevent that. And a couple chapters in that book were also about like what you can do to one, like study it on Earth without having to go to space to see what happens. But also what can you do, like drink a bunch of salt water before returning to Earth to make sure that once you arrive, you are actually more okay than you would be if you didn't have any anti-precautionary measures.

Okay. So like that science seems to be extraordinarily fascinating and also extraordinarily useful considering that we're working towards this being an interplanetary species where we are doing more in space. We are looking at potentially colonizing Mars. Like these are answers that are not only intriguing, but also We need to understand this soon.

I think AI is more relevant to the average consumer.

All right. So, so better left for a dinner party conversation then still. So then—

Or another Burning Man conversation.

Yeah, another Burning Man conversation. So then you, then you get to work in AI. Clearly it is the hottest, you know, industry and business area that's being talked about today. And you're in the, in the kind of text-to-speech side of things, which is also super intriguing. So, so talk to us a little bit about what ElevenLabs is working on.

ElevenLabs, as you mentioned, is a text-to-speech company. Our mission is to make content universally accessible in any language and voice, so you could dub a podcast that is still spoken in your voice into another language. That's like the goal. The more immediate use cases are inputting text and outputting audio. For example, if you want to create an audiobook, you can upload the EPUB file that is the format in which audiobooks come. And then you can immediately, instantly create the spoken version of that. You can even go as far as instead of having one voice read the entire audiobook, you can give each character their own voice and then have the dialogues with different characters, which I think is such a fun improvement to what— how we know audiobooks at the moment. So those are 2 examples of how text-to-speech can be used, and ElevenLabs is one of the leading AI companies in that space. With the best models that are really great at creating emotionality in the voices and having contextual awareness as well. And this contextual awareness is where AI really, really feeds in and where AI has allowed a breakthrough for text-to-speech compared to how, you know, Alexa speaks or Siri speaks, where the model understands what it is saying and therefore can say it in exactly the right way. So you could say a sentence, it's like, hi, my name is Victoria, I'm really sad, and that will come out sounding a lot sadder than if you would say, hi, I'm Victoria, I'm so happy. That would come out like more excited because of the context of that sentence, and you could also clone voices, so you could have that sentence spoken by me without me having to sit and record it in the first place in the happy and the sad version potentially.

Yeah, what I, what I love about Eleven, and I've heard about Eleven now over the last few months almost weekly, someone has mentioned it for a few reasons, and I'll, and I'll talk about why I'm excited, and I'm going to become a client quite quickly. I love also that it can also add the inflection and the intonation into the speech as well, so that it literally does take the written, the written word and it doesn't sound robotic. It really does sound like we would speak. So the reason I'm excited about it, I went into studio a year ago today. To record my 6th book. It's called The Second in Command. And I spent 2 and a half days in studio in Dubai recording my audiobook. And I literally felt like poking my effing eyes out with my pen. Like I was just like, someone kill me. This was 8 hours a day standing, trying to actually be excited with my content's really good. But it's hard for me to be excited reading it. I'm also not that great at reading. I'd rather stand in front of 1,000 people than stand and read to someone. And then to try to throw the inflection and the intonation in and without having to like read it and then also go on these little hyperlinks because I wanted to add more information that was probably coming in the next chapter anyway. And then all of a sudden I find out that I could literally now, like now that I've read that entire book, I can upload it. I can take a few of my speaking events and upload that content that will train your system AI. And then I could upload my other 5 books and your system could literally punch out the audio recording for me without me having to spend What would now be 14 more days in studio.

Exactly. You could be done today.

It's fucking amazing. It also, when I had to pay the authors to read my other 5 books, I paid them $6,000 each. I don't love their voice. They do sound a little bit kind of robotic. And strangely, people still want, because I've done so many paid speaking events, I've been paid to speak in 28 countries. I have this audience of people that want to read my content, but they want to hear me reading it for some reason.

Like we want to hear your voice.

Yeah. And they, they just don't like Fred who's reading it, even though Fred sounds fine. Right. So how the fuck does the system work? How does this, how does Eleven work?

Another use case, so, so quickly before we dive in a bit more into the tech, the other day when you lost your voice, you potentially could have continued recording podcasts if you would've, uh, uh, implemented some text-to-speech there as an idea. So, uh, both saving time in the studio, but also Saving time at home.

I did, I did actually also write down that I'm going to take a look at using ElevenLabs to also transcribe our podcast into a number of the best languages. Like, there's no reason why we shouldn't do, you know, Mandarin, Spanish, French, German. That's probably enough. I mean, like, what would the big 5 or 6 be?

Those are definitely on the top of the list. Definitely some that we, that we, that ElevenLabs offers as well. ElevenLabs has 28 languages that you can choose from, many, many more voices, but you can also upload your own voice and Mandarin, Spanish, German, French are all in there. You could even do English to English from your voice to Fred's voice or vice versa.

Yeah, I was at the— I've gone to the main 5-day TED conference for 11 years and at TED, I think it was last year, they had this guy on stage singing and then all of a sudden his voice changes and it's this woman's voice. And you see his mouth moving, you see him singing into a microphone, and AI literally changed it to this woman's voice in a different language. We're like, what the fuck? This is like, it's really cool shit. Like this isn't, and what I'm really frustrated around people speaking about AI right now is they're all talking about AI and they're talking about one software. They're talking about ChatGPT. That's one tool. I have a dashboard called There's an AI for That, and there's something like 8,000 different AI tools that exist. And everybody's talking about one of them. So how do we get people to understand what ElevenLabs does and to play with the tool? Who would you want playing with the tool to see the opportunities?

I do think that OpenAI has like a, was a pioneer in creating that fundamental shift or creating that mind-blowing moment for people first interacting with ChatGPT and understanding like AI is here to change the world. I think from the text space where ChatGPT operates, To the visual space where DALL-E or Midjourney operate, and then the voice space where ElevenLabs is dominating at the moment. I think the people, to your question of who should be using it, I think there's also almost no limit to this. The immediate thought is content creators. For example, you with podcasts or audiobooks, but also with shorter narration of videos or shorts, even like the voiceovers for any length. Length of video or movie or film can be done with ElevenLabs, but then you can continue thinking about it, and if you have awareness just going through your day, you can see almost infinite use cases for text-to-speech. One of the most unique ones I found within our customer base is a hospital that uses ElevenLabs to read out before a surgery all the possible side effects and consequences and everything that has to be read out to the patient before the surgery. And for that also, you understand why you wouldn't want it to be too robotic. And maybe even a doctor that reads this has to like rush through it too robotic. So a really good use case for that, but not one that I would've thought of in a dark room coming up with use cases. One that I'm also really excited about is for accessibility. So we found that on the B2C side, there are many users that use ElevenLabs for text-to-speech, be it because they're visually impaired and they have a hard time reading, and it's so much nicer to have human voice reading things to you rather than a robotic one, especially if you spend the majority of your day with text readers, et cetera, or people that have lost their voice as a result of throat cancer or similar, and or have trouble like with stutters or finishing their sentences. There's so many physical things that can impede your speech where ElevenLabs unlocks the option to speak again and even to speak again in your original voice. For those that have changed their voice over the course of time, they can have their old voices back or even their voice back, period. So I think in the accessibility space, it's also super exciting. That's on the B2C side. And we also serve to enterprise customers in there. It's another new Pandora's box. So much in there, like from automotive to like that hospital use case to gaming studios to production companies everywhere. The first aha moment I had with ElevenLabs was when I heard about it and then I took the bus home and every station there's a voice that announces the next stop and my mind just went to the operational costs of creating these recordings for me to know which bus stop is next and then there's a diversion and suddenly the bus driver has to tell me what the next stop is and it's almost impossible to understand them and so for me, I was like, okay, transportation, huge use case, probably a smaller one if you look at our enterprise suite now, but even there, like in day-to-day life, there's so much text-to-speech They could be leveraged.

So my mom passed away 20 years ago and there's an email that she wrote me that I reread frequently and it would be wonderful to be able to hear it in her voice and that would be something that if we ever had her voice, that could easily, if I had videos of her speaking, I could train AI to be able to speak it and then have her read the email to me of—

Yeah, that is actually a use case that comes up a lot for mothers, but also other family members and we've just implemented a workflow specifically for that, for the compliance parts of it. There are 2 ways on ElevenLabs to clone a voice. The first is instant voice cloning where you upload 30 seconds of audio and then you get a voice clone and you can read any text out loud in this specific voice. And then there's professional voice cloning, which is a higher quality voice clone for which you need 30 minutes of input data and ensure that the people cloning those voices have the rights to the voice, that it's their voice, we have a voice CAPTCHA as part of the flow. So you upload your samples, and then there's a flow in which you are confronted with a random sentence and you have to read it out loud, and then we manually go through to ensure that those voices are the same, and only if that proof exists that it's your voice, you can go through— we allow the model to train on the uploaded data. If you wanted to do that for your mother, there would be no way to pass that voice captcha. We've implemented a workaround where if you provide sufficient information to prove that you are the next of kin or have permissions over your mother's voice, we allow to professionally train, professionally clone those voices as well.

That's incredible. So one of the questions I had written down was around the legality of it and the prevention of the deepfake of videos and audio. One of the big scary— I don't think it's a meme, I think it is actually happening— are these audio messages, like voice messages that someone is getting from their mom. I'm in trouble. Don't call me. Don't email me. Send money to this number or they're going to kill me. And it's a fake. How are we preventing those kinds of things from happening? Is that from the training?

There's so many aspects to this and definitely something also that's really important to think about and to continue thinking about as AI gets better in all the different facets that exist. And I think a huge component of this is education, being aware or creating that awareness in the public that AI can now be almost anywhere and to have a critical eye when being confronted with a piece of content. The first pieces of this, I think I remember when Photoshop was being used more and like you would see posters of photographs and you would think like, oh my God, these people are flawless. And then I think the next shift of hearing content should be to think like, is this real or is this generated? So I think there's a huge educational component, but of course, a single company, like it would be lazy to say the public just has to be aware and then we solve it. There are also safeguards that we can roll out as part of developing the tech. And I think every AI company that is innovating at the moment has an ethical responsibility to develop safeguards. For example, watermarks. We have, as an example, what I just mentioned with the voice captures implemented that, but we also have a service called AI Speech Classifier where you can upload audio snippet and it will tell you whether it was generated with ElevenLabs. So if you were targeted and got a voice memo saying, I'm in trouble, don't email me, don't text me, you could upload it, to the AI voice classifier. You don't even need an ElevenLabs account for that, and then it will tell you with 90% certainty whether or not it was created, and that's a really handy tool to have for certainty around audio content.

All right, if you're the COO of a company that does at least $2 million or greater in revenue, or you're the CEO of a company and you're in the United States or Canada, if you would like a copy of my book, The Second in Command, For free, go to cooalliance.com/freebook. That's cooalliance.com/freebook. And I will mail you a copy for free. I will even cover the shipping. Jump on that one today. Is there a, is there a person on your team who could do a 20 or 30 minute demo of, and Q&A of what ElevenLabs could do? We have members from 17 countries in our COO Alliance. I would love to get them some exposure to what ElevenLabs is doing. Is there somebody that I can reach out to you later and get them to do a demo via Zoom to our team of 3 to 5 B2C, a few B2B, et cetera, use cases?

I wouldn't even be able to do that, but—

That would be amazing.

Put you in touch with someone from the revenue team that is closer to the enterprise customers.

Maybe we'll have you both show up and maybe you can do a Q&A on the CEO side. So is there a tie-in? I've got, I've had these Facebook Ray-Ban glasses for about a year, and they've just come out with the newest version of them. Is there a tie-in with ElevenLabs and what is going to be happening with the AR glasses so that if I'm looking at a sign, like I just walked into my Airbnb in Mexico and there's a sign and I can't read it, is there an opportunity to have that translated but then read to me? Are you working on that kind of technology or does that already exist?

In a way, yes. Like if a company of those glasses would want to incorporate that, they could easily build on top of ElevenLabs. They wouldn't even have to get an enterprise account. With any of our self-serve accounts, you get access to our APIs and you can build your own wrapper in a way on top of ElevenLabs. So all that would be needed then is to input the translated text, shoot us an API call, and you get back the audio and it could be read out loud through those glasses. So it is definitely a use case that ElevenLabs would support. But it is not one that we are working on in-house explicitly.

It's a conversion. I don't remember what this is called, but it's a conversion of all of these, like, voice and audio and photo and video that is converging. What's that called in AI right now, the convergence of all this?

Multimodal.

Multimodal. And I think that's what's really exciting is that, like, 3 years ago, I wore a pair of contact lenses. And by moving my eyeball around, I was able to play a song off my iPhone. I was in the lab using it. I'm like, this is crazy. that using my eye, I can turn on a song on my phone. Like, what the fuck? I think that's going to be really cool with your technology as well, the ability to have that multi-mobile kind of interface. So I need to know from your perspective and from your experience, what is the chief of staff title and where is it now fitting into— because it's a title that used to be only in government and now has really aggressively migrated into the business world in the last probably 10 years.

I think that the chief of staff title, at least in the sense that I've experienced it and now that it is at ElevenLabs, Is that I get to fill all the gaps that exist at a small company where the certain functions and projects haven't been set up sufficiently with their own role or even department. I joined Eleme Labs and the first thing I did was compliance and I'd never thought about compliance before, but I ramped up to understanding what is SOC 2 compliance, what do we need, how do we get there and how do we get there as fast as possible? And by adding this last factor of as fast as possible, I was able to make compliance something that's fun for myself, someone who isn't naturally drawn to compliance, and got through the entire SOC 2 process within 7 weeks. And now we have our SOC 2 compliance, but that's like one example of, of the gaps. The next one was hiring. There are a bunch of internal operations, even taxes, entity setup, all these different things that it takes to run a company that are a little bit falling through the cracks if you're only 10 to 20 people, the chief of staff gets to pick those up and carry those across the line. And those are a lot of tasks that would naturally fall on the CEO. And by picking them up makes more space for the CEO to focus on the expansion and focus on outward things or focus on the bigger topics that need more of, in this case, his attention. And, and kind of make, make room for that and more peace of, peace of mind as well by being really strong operationally. And I think that's one of the core things you need as a chief of staff. You also alleviate not only by picking up those things, but by tracking them and making sure that they never have to think about this again. They know that it's in good hands and it's gonna be done, executed, uh, fast and, and well.

So I think to be a really good chief of staff, you have to be very entrepreneurial, like kind of problem solve, think on your feet, cuz nobody has the system for you. You need to be very good at project management, very good at time management, probably a quick start that you say yes, and I'll figure it out as we go. Do you end up putting yourself out of a job over the next few years? Because as you said, that it almost seems like it's kind of like a jack of all trades, master of none, that you're just freaking good at everything. But sooner or later, you're going to have an expert running each domain area. Do you then migrate into a COO kind of role where you're leading all those people, which you already are doing? You said something that was really intriguing, which was it almost seems like a chief of staff is an early stage company role. And then as you get to a midsize enterprise level, that role doesn't exist anymore because now you have functional heads. Is that accurate?

That's a really good question. I think for me, it's an early stage role because that's where ElevenLabs is at the moment. But I think even at the midstage company, there are always like ad hoc projects, almost as if you, a chief of staff is like a SWAT team. So you can throw them at a specific thing that isn't going well. And, and they will figure it out. At Palantir before, I was functioning kind of as a chief of staff and Palantir is at 3,000 people, but it's still possible, like within the sub-organizations to have a need for that type of role. But I do think that the growth path of someone that joins early as a chief of staff can be to a COO role. And definitely for most of the things that I am setting up at the moment, the plan is to hire someone for finance, hire someone for talent, and hire someone for compliance. Mm-hmm.

It's very similar to my days at 1-800-GOT-JUNK when I was the chief operating officer. My, my first 2 or 3 years, I was probably more chief of staff because none of the business areas even existed. I had to build out every single business area. I came in as employee number 14. I left, we had 3,100. And then by the time I was at that third, then I was COO, but, you know, it was a very different role than, than the early days. It's why it's super intriguing to me. So. What was it like going from a big organization like a Palantir to an 11. Why did you make that jump? And what did the CEO see in you that made him realize that you weren't going to be this corporate bureaucratic researcher?

The reason I wanted to leave Palantir is because I wanted a faster pace. I think out of big tech corporations, Palantir is probably the fastest. But after being there for almost 4 years, I feel like I had figured out the system and I kind of knew where the bar was and how to just slightly exceeded with more limited speed. I was looking for something that's quicker and maybe even higher pressure. And I'm still at a point in my life where I want to put my career first rather than comfort first. And so I realized that an early stage startup is where I can both operate faster, but also do this thing that I love where I get thrown at something that I have no idea about and then figure it out and operationalize it. And then it's, it's fixed quickly. And then I found ElevenLabs because the CEO is actually also Palantirian. He had left almost a year before me to start ElevenLabs. So I knew about its inception from even before it was incorporated. I knew Matty from Palantir days and had been following ElevenLabs. And then when ElevenLabs launched in February and it was a huge success, We caught up and spoke about the needs, the operational needs of the company at that moment. And I came with some ideas for each of those. And we had a few conversations around that. And I think both that plus knowing many of the people that I worked with and speaking to them about it was what convinced him that I'm not a bureaucratic corporate worker. And I think that is proven successful as well. I think one of the best consequences of it is that there's a lot of trust between the CEO and me from knowing each other from the previous workplace as well, or knowing each other outside of this role. And I think that is something that really helps or accelerated the ability for the two of us to work together productively from the very beginning.

That's incredible. Did I hear you right though, that Eleven only started in February? Was that February of this year or February of last year?

February of this year, we launched the product publicly in beta, but it was incorporated a year earlier. The CTO and the CEO started it in 2022 and were developing the model until it was released in February of this year and then launched super successfully and now has over millions of users on the B2C side. And we exited beta in August of this year.

Yeah, it's a ridiculously fast start. You've raised money. I think you raised $20 million at a $100 million valuation. When you're raising $20 million, it doesn't even matter if that's pre or post money valuation. It's still, it's, that's a hell of a raise. What did investors see and how are you using the money? And then how did it change the company?

It did happen super fast. In fact, there was a pre-seed round when they started the company and then skipped the seed round straight to Series A of this I think what the investors saw, to put it bluntly, they saw the numbers. They saw how much users were loving this and how much it could uptake in just a few months. Like it was probably the fastest growing company in the world for a while of this year. And so that is already something that's convincing to the investors. But I think there's also an atmosphere shift from when ElevenLabs was first incorporated and it was maybe a little bit harder to raise money in the pre-seed round. to the world we are in in 2023, where the potential upside of AI is so much more prevalent and something that investors are seeking out and realizing as well.

This could go on for days because I'm so intrigued with the space, with you as a leader. We've got to wrap. I'll ask you kind of my one standard question. What advice would you give to the 21 or 22-year-old Victoria? You know, maybe she's just heading off to do her— or just finishing your undergraduate degree. What advice would you give yourself that you know to be true today, but you wish you'd known back then?

I think it would be that no one else knows better. I think often you think that, okay, I'm confronted with this question. I need to find someone that knows the answer to this question. And in the workplace, that's often like escalating to your lead and being like, I, we need to file our end-year report in with the HMRC. What do we do? As like a recent example. And the answer is so frequently, I don't know. So if you start with the assumption that no one else knows better or knows the answer immediately and allows you to go and seek it out yourself and find a way to get it done yourself. And I think for me, that is one of the pieces that are like core to the way I work now and what has made me valuable to the places I work at as well is because I just go and figure out how to do the thing.

I love it. This is going to be a really fun ride to watch. I think you and Eleven are going to be doing some incredible stuff. I definitely need you to let me know when you're going public, please. I've missed out. I told the founder of Uber it was the stupidest idea I've ever heard. I missed out on the founders round of a couple other companies. I'm not missing out on this one. Victoria Weller, the chief of staff for ElevenLabs, thanks so much for sharing with us on the Second Command podcast.